The Bloomsbury Handbook of Oral History

Alistair Thomson, Erin Jessee, Alexander Freund

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350379930
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Oral History is a comprehensive examination of oral history which addresses a wide range of practitioners, from beginning students to graduate students and established scholars, community and freelance practitioners in the field, and those from other fields and disciplines interested in oral history. The purpose of the book is to provide a broad range of readers with:

* An advanced introduction into and overview of the field;
* Cutting-edge reflections on core themes in the field; and
* Global comparative perspectives on oral history theory and practice

The Handbook is arranged in five thematic Parts: Creating Interviews, Interpreting Oral Histories, Making Histories, Advocacy & Empowerment, and Big Questions & Future Directions. Each chapter documents the state-of-the-art in a particular subject area and surveys the international historiography and current debates. Each chapter concludes with a brief outlook of potential future developments in the field.

With chapter authors from every region of the oral history world - North America, South America, Oceania, Africa, Asia and Europe - and each author making use of examples and scholarship from across the global field of oral history, this volume represents the first truly international handbook of oral history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction
• PART ONE Creating Interviews
• CHAPTER ONE Oral History and the Interview
• CHAPTER TWO The Interviewee’s Experience of Oral History
• CHAPTER THREE Designing Ethical Oral History Projects and Partnerships
• CHAPTER FOUR The Oral History Relationship: Interviewing Latin American Activists
• CHAPTER FIVE The Anxieties of Oral History Dialogues
• PART TWO Interpreting Oral Histories
• CHAPTER SIX Oral History as Evidence: Multidisciplinary Approaches
• CHAPTER SEVEN Voice, Emotion, Language, Narrative, Body: Analyzing Meaning in Oral History
• CHAPTER EIGHT Oral History as Data: Multimodal Approaches to Analysis and Interpretation
• CHAPTER NINE When Relationships and Stories Guide Our Practice: Subjectivities, Intersubjectivities, and Intersectionality in Oral History
• CHAPTER TEN Negotiating Interpretative Conflict in Oral History
• PART THREE Making Histories
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Writing Oral History
• CHAPTER TWELVE Oral History and Creative Writing
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN Listening for Place: Curating Landscape with Oral History
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Making Audiovisual Histories: Oral History in Disguise
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Oral History Performance
• PART FOUR Advocacy and Empowerment
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Listening for Change: OralHistory, Policy, and Professional Practice
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Crisis Oral History: Methodology, Ethics, and Pedagogy
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Testimony and Transitional Justice: Speaking, Truth, and Power
• CHAPTER NINETEEN Teaching with Oral History: Reckoning with Stories of the Past
• PART FIVE Current Challenges and Future Directions
• CHAPTER TWENTY I Am the Voice of My Ancestors: Defining Oral History on Indigenous Terms
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Oral History and Our Planetary Future
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Monitoring the Self: Oral History in an Age of Autobiography and Surveillance
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE AI and Oral History: Anticipating Oral History’s Fifth Paradigm
• EPILOGUE Oral History in Troubling Times
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX